d
unobtrusive example.

And in the third decade of the century the Puritans were well on the way
to the control of Church and Parliament. All over England they were
sending to Westminster men of their own stubborn temper for whom
political and religious liberty were but two sides of the same shield.
They were buying up impropriated tithes and gaining control of
appointments to livings. In hundreds of parishes the congregations
remained outside while the official reader intoned the service from the
Prayer Book, and then entered to hear their chosen minister preach
doctrines that boded ill to the cause of royal authority. To the
over-sanguine it might have seemed that episcopacy was beginning to
break down into congregationalism, and congregationalism laying the
foundation for control of Parliament, when Charles I, in March, 1629,
pronounced the famous dissolution that marked the beginning of his
personal rule. It was then that many Nonconformists, despairing of
success at home, began to look to America as God's appointed refuge
"from the generall callamitie"; and the ten years from 1630 to 1640,
during which the king endeavored with the aid of Wentworth to dispense
with Parliament, and with the aid of Laud to crush out Nonconformity, is
precisely the period of the great Puritan migration to New England.

In the summer of that very year 1629 a group of Nonconformists, under
the lead of John Winthrop, a gentleman of Suffolk whose estate was
becoming inadequate to his customary manner of living, convinced
themselves that they could best serve God by renouncing the struggle
against king and bishop in order to set up in America a "due form of
Government both civil and ecclesiastical." And for such an enterprise it
seemed that the way had been miraculously prepared. In March, 1628, John
Endicott and five associates had obtained from the New England Council a
grant of land extending from a point three miles north of the Merrimac
River to three miles south of the Charles, and westward from the
Atlantic as far as the South Sea. The enterprise had in the mean time
been joined by many Nonconformists, and in 1629 the associates obtained
from the king a charter which confirmed their rights to the land, and in
addition authorized them, under the title of "The Governor and Company
of Massachusetts Bay," to establish and govern colonies within the
limits of their jurisdiction. All the powers of the company were
intrusted to a governor